CHAPTER VII

IV.

THE FIRE FROM HEAVEN

Christianity began as a deossification, so to speak, of the emphatically monotheistic legalism of Pharisaic Judaism. It was as though the Lord, who spoke of old by Amos and Isaiah, had awaked as one out of sleep, and like a giant refreshed with wine. The trumpet call is sounded by a strange ascetic, John the Baptist, in whom is the spirit and power of an Elijah. He summons to righteousness against the background of that hope of a catastrophic world-redemption which had been generated by two centuries of Jewish apocalyptic. But the law and the prophets were until John; he is a mere precursor, there follows one who will baptize, not with water, but with fire.

“I came to cast fire upon the earth; would that it were already kindled” (Lk. 12. 49). Jesus comes as the originator of a new epoch, but also as the climax of that unique historic process in which the prophets of the Old Testament are the outstanding figures. To him as to them, the divine initiative is paramount. His call to his appointed task is by a vision and a voice. He constantly resorts to the mountain for communion with the Divine. His whole being is God-centred, but it is orientated towards a deepened and more developed conception of God than that of the old prophets. Concisely this is expressed by the choice of the metaphor of father, in substitution for that of king or judge, as the regulative description of the relation of God to man. Correlated to, and consequent on, this enrichment in the conception of God, is a reiterated insistence on absolute trust as the essence of the right attitude of man to the Father in Heaven. How futile, then, to debate whether or not Jesus went up to Jerusalem in order to die; he went because he felt it was God's purpose that he should go; but even in Gethsemane he was not certain how that purpose would work out. To summarize the essence of religion he selected two precepts from the Law, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, with all thy heart and soul and mind and strength, and thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. But obedience to these, as he saw it, meant a revolutionary reversal of human values which will estimate greatness in proportion to service, 'Whosoever of you will be chiefest shall be servant of all.' Hence the paradox of the Beatitudes, 'Blessed are ye poor,' for those who have little at stake in this world may more easily adopt towards God the approach of a little child —which is the way of entry into the Kingdom of Heaven.

For nearly two thousand years Christians have wrangled over the meaning of the titles Son of Man, and Son of God, which Jesus seems to have accepted—at least when applied to him by others, even if he did not (as some think) explicitly claim one or both for himself. Had such issues been directly put before him, he would have replied, we may perhaps surmise, that in regard to intellectual problems of theology, as to the application to life of principles of ethics, light sufficient for the day is given day by day, along with ' daily bread,' to those who look upwards to their Heavenly Father; and that insight into these questions sufficient for the needs of an individual or an age is among the things that will be added unto those who seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness.

Be this as it may, it would be absurd to attempt, in a sub-section of a single chapter, to give an outline of the life of Jesus, to present in systematic form his teaching, to relate it rightly to that of Rabbis or Apocalyptists, to portray his character, or to appraise the significance of his person for religion. So large is the theme, so vast the literature concerning it, that it is better altogether to decline this task. Moreover, the title of this chapter demands rather that we trace the developing results of the dynamic impact of his personality as exhibited in the more striking features of the Christianity of the Apostolic Age.

The Theocentric outlook taught by the prophets of the Old Testament, and re-asserted in the teaching of Jesus, is notably characteristic of the primitive Church. Only it has become more all-pervasive, more intimate and richer in content, because it is now inextricably mingled with what we must call a Christocentric religious attitude. In the first generation, and among Jewish Christians, this was possible without any sort of theological speculation as to the person of Christ. The Palestinian Jew was the reverse of philosophically-minded; he naturally thought in pictures. Jewish apocalyptic provided the vivid picture of a super­natural personage, the Son of Man, sitting on the right hand of God until the Great Day, when he would become the divine instrument for judging the wicked and initiating the righteous into an aeon of superhuman beatitude. The belief in the Resurrection of Jesus was indissolubly connected with the identification of him with this apocalyptic Son of Man; but that was not all. The day of Pentecost which followed the Crucifixion was a moment of spiritual crisis. The little company found itself possessed by a throbbing consciousness of a Spiritual Presence—accompanied by a psychological upheaval which found expression in ecstatic utterance and a 'visualization' of tongues of fire. They knew themselves to be in personal contact with the Risen Christ. This mystical apprehension of a presence' they expressed to their own minds under the analogy of the then familiar phenomenon of spirit-possession. The vividness of the experience, combined with the Jewish lack of interest in metaphysic, made it possible for them to speak of the possessing spirit alternatively as the spirit of God or the spirit of Christ, or simply as Christ, without feeling any need to relate these modes of expression to one another in a logical or theological way. “Now the Lord is the Spirit; and where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty”. Not until Christianity had invaded the Greek world, with its preoccupation in metaphysic, did questions of this kind demand an imperative answer. Rumblings of the controversy which the attempt to give them a philosophical answer inevitably produced can be heard in Colossians; in the opening section of Hebrews, and more clearly in the Fourth Gospel, we find adumbrated the main line along which the thinking of the later Church was to develop.

Possession by the Spirit is spoken of by Paul as a phenomenon whose presence was as capable of objective verification as is that of a physical disease, save that it manifests itself not as weakness but as power. The immediate results of this experience of spirit-possession defined in terms of Christ were psychological and ethical. It produced an internal revolution in the outlook of the individual. “If any man is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things are passed away”.  The community of disciples became a fellowship, instinct—almost hilariously so—with love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance, “which were the authentic fruit of the spirit”. The words are Paul's, but the quality of life they describe he had found already existent in the Church. One natural expression of this spirit was the attempt to “have all things common”; another was that habitual submission of all problems, individual and communal, to the direction of the Holy Spirit, which is so emphasized in the Acts.

This communal spirit-possession has a bearing on the tradition of the sayings of Christ and stories of his deeds. Those which have come down to us have done so because they commended themselves to the spiritual insight and ethical values of the primitive community. They afford, therefore, further evidence of the quality of life in the community which selected and preserved them. Nor are they less evidential to those who accept the contention of “Form Critics” and others, that many of these sayings or stories are a product of the community mind. Take, for example, the saying, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst”; if this was not pronounced by the Master when on earth, only the more clearly is it evidence of the conviction of the community which attributed the words to him.

Yet another expression of this spirit-possession was the re­appearance of the prophet. The prophets of the New Testament epoch are like those of the Old, in that they were more frequently concerned to preach righteousness than to predict the future; but there is an important difference. The Old Testament prophets arose in a small nation which felt its national deity to be close at hand; and prophecy reached its sublimest expression in the Babylonian exile, where the faithful community knew itself to be, as it were, an island of devotedness to the true God in an ocean of false religions. But later Jewish monotheism, by stressing the majesty of God and the littleness of man, had made the gap between man and God so great that belief waned in the continuance of the kind of personal contact between them which revelation implies: in the great days of old, God had spoken with man through his prophets, He would not so speak to the little men of the degenerate present. For Christians this was changed. Now that the divine spirit was thought of as being somehow one with the spirit of that gracious Jesus whom they had known on earth, this notion of the distance and remoteness of the Divine passed away. Once more it seemed natural that “sons and daughters should prophesy, that young men should see visions and old men dream dreams—and had not such an outpouring of the spirit been foretold for the last days?”. Thus it became an everyday event for some Christian to stand forth in the community as a prophet; but instead of beginning,” Thus saith the Lord”, his message was given as directly inspired by the Spirit of Christ.

The sublime and varied quality of this spirit of prophecy, when functioning at its best and highest, stands out in numerous passages in the New Testament. Thus in the midst of a long argument to the Corinthians, on the right use of spiritual gifts, Paul suddenly passes from prose to poetry, and, with rhythmic speech matching exalted mood, dictates the Hymn to Charity. Again the substance, perhaps even the wording, of many of the discourses in the Fourth Gospel—so the author more than hints—came to him through the spirit. So, too, it was in the spirit on the Lord’s daythat there came to the Seer in Patmos visions of the Adoration of the Lamb and of the New Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven.  

V.

JEW AND GENTILE